The positives and negatives
of service user led training –
from the service user’s
perspective
A life in the day Volume 8 Issue 4 November 2004 © Pavilion
19
Hearing about the personal experiences of service
users is a very powerful means of learning how
people feel about the way they are treated by the
psychiatric system. It has a real impact on you
when you witness it. This can, sadly, be because
many mental health professionals have never seen
mental health service users when they are not ill.
Having to confront the idea of service users as
intelligent and articulate individuals rather than as
drugged-up manifestations of the labels that
psychiatry has deemed to slap on us forces them
to reassess their view of service users and
consequently leads to a re-evaluation of their
ideas and practices. This can help bring about a
real change in attitudes among staff working in
mental health, helping us move towards the
cultural shift that has to happen in psychiatric
services before service users are treated with
respect. There are also examples of discrimination
that happen without staff realising it, and this can
come through complacency or just through not
realising the effect they have on service users.
The idea of service users educating mental
health professionals about their own experiences
of mental health difficulties and the psychiatric
system is still fairly novel and, in its own way,
quietly revolutionary. That reversal of the
position of power and control is an interesting
one, where the all-powerful mental health
professional becomes subservient in a student
role to the teacher role of the service user, and is
one with which some mental health workers
have real problems.
There is an expectation, unintentionally
created, that the trainer should have all the
answers, despite the role of ‘helpless mental
patient’ into which many workers pigeonhole
service users. This can result in mental health
workers having no qualms about heckling a
service user trainer during a service user led
training session. This is not standard practice in
schools, colleges and universities and, let’s face
it, it really is terribly rude and inconsiderate for
so-called professionals to interrupt when
someone is talking to them. It does happen,
although not too often I’m pleased to say. Many
professionals do not like to be challenged and do
become very defensive. But, hey, there’s a time
and place for questions and stuff, and if you do
want to interrupt, at least have the courtesy to
With service user led training becoming more popular in the training of mental health workers, little
attention seems to have been paid to how the trainers themselves experience this and the effect it has
on them. Here Shaun Johnson, who has worked as the facilitator of a service user led training
organisation and is a service user trainer himself, gives an overview of the issues and difficulties faced
by service user trainers and how their lives could be made so much easier if unintentionally created
problems could be avoided.
Shaun Johnson
Service user trainer
Education